Anus: The Trace

What will the soup of the future dwellers of the Earth be made with? In what waters will they be bathing? Soylent waters mixed in with algae?

Tell them what? The ocean's dying. Plankton's dying. It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people. Next thing … they'll be breeding us like cattle for food. —Soylent Green

Soylent Green, a thriller from 1973 presents us with a scenario where an overpopulated world is fed with a wafer supposedly made out of plankton. But in reality it is a product of recycled human remains. At what point of the capitalist mode of production are we going to end up on the conveyor belt? Unless serious attempts at rediscovering the powers of the primordial soup are made, human-kind will have to consume itself. From a cynical point of view it seems like the only way out of the anthroposhit, but it disregards any possibility for symbiotic dialogue and all the other beings that will suffer along with us. We all leave a trace, with every breath, with every step, with every shit, and that trace carries on a life of its own in the never-ending cycle of metabolisms.

How, through a review on such symbiotic processes can we define a metabolic aesthetical practice which is relevant within the social soup? The soup, with its many ingredients, animate or inanimate, emanate a force, calling for reconciliation. The depths of every object, as ungraspable as our own innards, should not be neglected on the basis of not understanding. Let us consider the role of aesthetics in the web of relations. Aesthetics is not just a human attitude, rather a primordial form of relation and interaction, it opens up a realm of the unspoken. Aesthetics describes what Alfred North Whitehead calls feelings. The ways in which objects (not solely living and self-conscious) affect, and are affected by, other objects, even when there is no practical knowledge development. It come down to the human responsibility to share their multidimensional space with the other-than-human, for commonalities to become apparent. Aesthetics must be a leading force in this development as it comprises of a symbiotic dialogue between elements. It stimulates movement of thought and practice, but is certainly not an egalitarian model by default, it also leaves a material and mental footprint and treads on ethical questions of the existence of non-breathing beings. In his essays on aesthetical being, Neo-Kantist philosopher José Ortega y Gasset explores the arts as not being exclusively linked to human being. He does not wish to claim that inanimate objects can feel and think. Instead, he claims that an object is an ‘I’ not because of its cognitive abilities, but simply because it is. What does ingested yoghurt do when it enters us? How does the soil feel? What do microscopic creatures experience? In "The Varieties of Religious Experience", philosopher William James rationalizes such mystical events by their:

1) Ineffability: its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others.
2) Noetic quality: the state may be highly affective, but it is primarily a state of knowledge, whereby one achieves insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.
3) Transiency: it is fleeting and impermanent.
4) Passivity: the subject does not have the power to induce it or control its course.

So yes, food is in fact present all around, in different states and shapes, always with its tentacular ways of being. It is animate and animates further. The way living organisms absorb and release what is taken in deepens the understanding of food on a grander scheme. Our body is full of creatures guiding us through life, we are sustaining them, our tissue is like the porous walls of the termite mound, taking in sun rays and emitting heat and sweat. What we do with that? Use anti-transpirant deodorant, mouthwash, antibacterial soaps and antibiotics, just to suppress the other that is a part of us. The way we treat food has a marker of our treatment of the entire ecosphere. Fermentation is one of the only processes in which we encourage growth of non-human beings whilst serving our basic needs. The one who is smarter is the one able to change their way of thinking for the common good. Humans at this stage have a very limited scope of this idea, serving only their surroundings on the endeavor for solace. Filling the void, which is the stomach, with food can and will bring us down, unless a serious queering of the human to more-than-human relationship is brought to the table. A closed system is a construct of the human capacity to idealize. No closed systems occur in nature. Metabolism is an infinite string of happenings. Through tentacular models of being, new, open interactions can be found. Physicist Lee Smolin observes systems of isolation, which cannot be fulfilling. In the vast universe, or in the confines of a classroom there are always interactions between any subsystem we may define and things outside it. All we must do in these turbulent times is let them flow through us and with us, before we end up self-consuming ourselves.

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